The Past, Present and Future of Business analysis

December 27, 2018

Over the
years technology has bridged many gaps. These gaps existed between processes,
skills and resources. However, an interesting turn of events happened with the
era of Business analysis. This brought a time where data became the real asset
and insights, disruptions and innovations followed. Not only this, data
analysis helped solving recurrent business problems, something quite
unimaginable in the times of manual file-based processes.

How did it all start?

Back in
the days when everything was manually recorded on paper within hard bound
files, technology gave the world a better way to manage processes with IT
systems. Once these systems were in place, everyone started creating a lot of
data. Only after a few years of accumulation of this data did organisations
thought about using this data for generating value. This is where business
analysis took precedence. There was an obvious market need for innovation and
organisations realised that they need to be able to analyse this data and draw
insights.

What does the present look like?

Today business analysis courses has evolved as an amalgamation of domains and analytical skills. Domain is one of the key ingredients for identifying patterns because without an understanding of the business it is simply not quite possible to draw any kind of conclusions or even understand the data. Several analytical techniques have become common. Some include MOST (Mission, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics), PESTLE (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental), SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats), MOSCOW (Must or Should, Could or Would) and Six Thinking Hats.

Today,
data talks well with folks with a keen understanding of domain and a good grasp
of implementing analytical techniques. Their key challenges are ensuring that
data is relevant and integrated. Once solved, organisations can harness the
data and release innovative solutions in the market. Over the past few years,
the market has witnessed ideas ranging from digitised health platforms to big
data stylist services – all born from data analysis. And this is just the tip
of the iceberg!

What does the future hold?

With
automation and agile becoming a norm, there is an obvious push towards
complexity. This means a major chunk of business analysis tasks that require
human intervention today will be automated. While this is great news from a
business perspective because it will bring reduced errors, lower cost of
maintenance and less time to insights. The other end of the impact would be on
utilisation of the insights resulted from data analysis. This would most likely
be the next sweet spot where a keen understanding of business strategy would
come into play to make real business decisions.

Business
analysis that we know as of today is a much-advanced version of what it
initially was scoped to deliver. Today, business analysis attempts to solve the
data challenge by identifying the right data and analysing it to solve business
problems. While the future looks complex, we can expect some real innovation
and market disruptions from business analysis.